Look at the universe: are you overwhelmed or amazed?

This radical discrepancy between the scale of our own lives and the scale of the rest of existence can leave us feeling two different ways. One of them, akin to the feeling of losing something, is that the universe is dauntingly large and we are terrifying insignificant. The other, akin to the feeling of finding, is that the universe is dauntingly large and yet here we are, unimaginably unlikely and therefore precious beyond measure. As with so  many other contrasting feelings, most of us will experience both of these eventually. It is easy to feel small and powerless; easy, too, to feel  amazed and fortunate to be here.

On the whole, though, I take the  side of amazement.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 234

Does an administrator have to read the statutes?

One of the ablest administrators that it was my good fortune to know, I believe, never read a least more than casually, the statutes that he translated into reality. He assumed that they gave him power to deal with the broad problems of an industry, and upon that understanding he sought his own solutions.

James M. Landis, The Administrative Process 75 (Yale Univ. Press 1938), quoted in Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960, at 217 (Oxford Univ. Press 1992)

Grieving for the future

Grief confuses us by  spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s what I realized while talking with my friend —that everything  that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 74

Grief is boring

Like anything that goes in for too long, grief is (I don’t know why people don’t talk about this aspect of it more often) unbelievably boring. I don’t mean in its earliest days, when the sorrow is too acute and the overall rearrangement of life too recent to allow for anything like tedium. Eventually, though, as you grow accustomed to its constant companionship, the monotony sets in. I can’t recall exactly how long after my father’s death this happened to me, because mourning also played havoc with  my sense of time, but I think several months must have passed when the grief that had sloshed around turbulently inside me ebbed into a stagnant pool. It made life extremely dull and it made me seem extremely dull and, above all, it became, itself, unbelievably wearying.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 61

Ketchup-Bottle Type of Argument

We find this to be a ketchup-bottle type of argument: it looks quite full, but it is remarkably difficult to get anything useful out of it.

Judge Bruce M. Selya, The Dartmouth Review v. Dartmouth College, 889 F.2d 13, 18 (1st Cir. 1989)

Trollope, Cross-Examined

    Codd [a barrister] was not always so lucky. He once defended a man for stealing from a post-office, and cross-examined one of the prosecution witnesses.

    "What is your occupation?"

    "A supervisor of the Post Office," said Anthony Trollope.

    "And have you also written a book called Barchester Towers?"

    The witness agreed.

    "Was there a word of truth in that book from beginning to end?"

    "It was a work of fiction", said Trollope.

    "Fiction or not," said Codd relentlessly, "was there a word of truth in it from beginning to end?"

    "Well, if you put it that way," said Trollope, "there was not."

    Codd sat down in triumph. He invited the jury in due course to consider whether they could possibly convict on the evidence of a man like that.

    They could and did. But you can never tell with juries.

R. G. Hamilton, All Jangle and Riot: A Barrister's History of the Bar (Abingdon, Oxon.: Professional Books, 1986), p. 274

Nuclear Power’s Big Downside

Splitting atoms to boil water was never a good idea. Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste, and 80 years into the nuclear age, we still have no idea what to do with these lethal byproducts.

Thomas Bass, The Bomb Next Door, American Scholar, Summer 2022, at 33, 34.

Librarian Follows up

I reshelved the paper, stepped outside, and locked the door. Miss Mountjoy was still sitting idle at her desk when I returned the key.

“Did you find what you were looking for, dearie?” she asked.

“Yes, I said, making a great show of dusting off my hands.

“May I inquire further?” she asked coyly. “I might be able to direct you to related materials.”

Translation: She was perishing with nosiness.

“No, thank you, Miss Mountjoy,” I said.

Alan Bradley, Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (New York: Bantam Dell, 2009), ch. 5

Law Students Should Learn Law Practice (1933)

The law student should learn, while in school, the art of legal practice. And to that end, the law schools should boldly, not slyly and evasively, repudiate the false dogmas of Langdell. They must decide not to exclude, as did Langdell—but to include—the methods of learning law by work in the lawyer's office and attendance at the proceedings of courts of justice. . . . They must repudiate the absurd notion that the heart of a law school is its library.

Jerome Frank, "What Constitutes Good Legal Education?" (speech to the ABA Section of Legal Education, 1933), cited in Edward T. Lee, The Study of Law and Proper Preparation (Chicago, 1935), quoted in Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: Univ. N. Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 156-57.

The Framers Had the Advantage of Few Books

There is truth in the reply of a great lawyer when asked how the lawyers who formed the United States Constitution had such a mastery of legal principles: "Why, they had so few books."

Charles Warren, The Colonial Lawyer's Education, in A History of the American Bar (1911) (quoted in David Shrager & Elizabeth Frost, The Quotable Lawyer (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1986), p. 58)

Sometimes there's a clear precedent

 The appellant has attempted to distinguish the factual situation in this case from that in Renfroe v. Higgins Rack Coating and Manufacturing Co., Inc. (1969), 17 Mich App 259. He didn’t. We couldn’t.

Affirmed. Costs to appellee.

Denny v. Radar Industries, Inc., 28 Mich. App. 294 (1970) (J. H. Gillis, J.)

Judge Rubin wrote opinions in pro se cases

Alvin's habit of writing opinions in nearly all pro se cases reflects one aspect of his civility. He often deprecated the use of long opinions in routine cases, but he ordinarily declined to enter one line dispositions. “Let us write a little,” he would say, and he would then succinctly but painstakingly explain the court's ruling, especially to pro se and under-represented litigants. 

Edith Hollan Jones, A Farewell to Judge Alvin B. Rubin, 70 Tex. L. Rev. 1, 5 (1991)

Alvin's habit of writing opinions in nearly all pro se cases reflects one aspect of his civility. He often deprecated the use of long opinions in routine cases, but he ordinarily declined to enter one line dispositions. “Let us write a little,” he would say, and he would then succinctly but painstakingly explain the court's ruling, especially to pro se and under-represented litigants.

Edith Hollan Jones, A Farewell to Judge Alvin B. Rubin, 70 Tex. L. Rev. 1, 5 (1991)

Alvin's habit of writing opinions in nearly all pro se cases reflects one aspect of his civility. He often deprecated the use of long opinions in routine cases, but he ordinarily declined to enter one line dispositions. “Let us write a little,” he would say, and he would then succinctly but painstakingly explain the court's ruling, especially to pro se and under-represented litigants.

Edith Hollan Jones, A Farewell to Judge Alvin B. Rubin, 70 Tex. L. Rev. 1, 5 (1991)

Origin of That "Seamless Web" Metaphor

Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.

Frederic William Maitland, Prologue to a History of English Law, 14 Law Quarterly Review 13 (1898). Also: Pollock & Maitland, The History of English Law, 2d ed. (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1898), vol. 1, p. 1

Accessible legal research tools needed for justice (1910)

As the situation now stands, it is impracticable for the average litigant always to get Justice in the average case, for the lawyer he employs often can not properly investigate all the law, that is the multifarious and conflicting authorities, and prepare his briefs without an expenditure of labor and of time out of all proportion to the real value of the services to the client. Often an astute lawyer, either by reason of his ability, his ingenuity or his good fortune, locates or stumbles across a line of authorities which, while not correct in principle, are sufficiently weighty to impress the trial Judge, and the lawyer on the other side is either not sufficiently learned or sufficiently industrious to get the correct decisions on the other side which conflict with and which, if used in argument, would overcome those presented by his opponent. This results in more mistakes and errors in Trial Courts than should occur, and often, indeed very generally, it is impossible, for financial reasons, for the loser to take an appeal.

Lucien Hugh Alexander, Memorandum in re Corpus Juris, 22 Green Bag 59, 84 (1910)

Professor Values Quotation Books. Also RAs.

It's amazing how four or five quotation books and a good research assistant can cover for my lack of education.

C. Steven Bradford, The Gettysburg Address as Written by Law Students Taking an Exam, 86 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1094, 1102 n. 42 (1992)

Detective V.I. Warshawski Gets a Computer

An hour with the library's computer specialist reinforced my need to buy my own machine. Not that the specialist wasn't helpful—she was, very. But the amount of information available at the end of a phone line was so great, and my need for it so strong, that it didn't make sense to be dependent on the hours the library was open.

Sara Paretsky, Guardian Angel (New York: Dell, 1993), p. 215

Justice O'Connor on Libraries

 In my work a good library is essential. It enables me to learn the background and previous discussion of the various issues I am called upon to decide. It provides the stability and continuity for the rule of law.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, quoted in 24 American Libraries 1048 (Dec. 1993)

Vision of Library, 1876

The time was when a library was very like a museum, and a librarian was a mouser in musty books, and visitors looked with curious eyes at ancient tomes and manuscripts. The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is in the highest sense a teacher, and the visitor is a reader among the books as a workman among his tools.

Melvil Dewey, The Profession, American Library Journal 1 (1876): 5-6 (reprinted in Sarah K. Vann, ed., Melvil Dewey: His Enduring Presence in Librarianship (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1978)

Weddington Went to the Library

That question was not something I had studied in Constitutional Law or in any other law school class, but I knew what to say: "I do not know, but I will go to the library and look it up." That trip to the library twenty-one years ago began a journey that has never ended and has brought me here today.

Sarah Weddington, Roe v. Wade: Past and Future, 24 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 601, 602 (1990)

Need to Guard Against Gradual Oppression

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of the change in the air—however sight—lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.

William O. Douglas, The Douglas Letters, p. 162 (Melvin Urofsky ed., 1987) (Sept. 10, 1976, letter to Young Lawyers Section of Washington State Bar Association)

Sinclair Lewis on Library Chance

 "When you drop into the library and take out a book you never know what you're wasting your time on."

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (quoted in Norman D. Stevens, Two Hundred and Twenty Thousand Platitudes, American Libraries, May 1998, at 79, 81.